The indomitable Margo MacDonald and Glasgow GP Dr Iain Kerr have, in different ways, focused attention on dying. More importantly, the manner of dying – whether it is fraught, perhaps messy and controlled by others or whether it is pain-free and dignified, exercising the last right that is left to us.

Margo's moving TV documentary My Right To Die confronted us with the fate we must all face and wrestled with assisted suicide, legalised euthanasia and the other euphemisms that surround terminal illness. The overpowering question she asked was: "How can we criminalise someone who performs the ultimate act of compassion?"

Dr Kerr appeared before the General Medical Council's disciplinary committee accused of "prescribing medication to seven patients without taking into account relevant prescribing guidance and without taking account of the best interests of the patients", in particular supplying a suicidal pensioner with sleeping tablets.

These contrasting approaches make one thing clear: death with dignity is an idea whose time has come. Sooner rather than later, a decent death will be an accepted entitlement – and Scotland has the chance to establish itself as a progressive modern nation, able to deal in a mature way with even the most sensitive issues, especially one that is bedeviled by superstition and religious bugaboos.

By one of those ridiculous constitutional quirks produced by devolution, the Scottish Parliament has power over death, but not birth. Abortion is reserved to Westminster, but Holyrood can rule on the criminalisation of euthanasia or assisted death. If they have the guts, they should use it.

Last week, the UK Government announced a new policy giving terminally-ill patients more choice over where – but not how – they die. The Scottish Government is also working on its plans for end-of-life care and has the chance to be bolder.

Margo, who suffers from degenerative Parkinson's disease, does not expect to need euthanasia but wants the reassurance of knowing there is an exit strategy if she becomes intolerably helpless: "Being utterly dependent, not being able to exercise choice and determine what happens to me, that's what I don't want." Surely, anyone with self-respect has a horror of becoming a liability or, as a son heartrendingly described his mother in Margo's film, "a shrivelled shell shrunk into the corner of the bed". I have written before, from personal experience of loved ones, that is not life; it is a living death.

There is no doubt the quest for a decent death is on the increase. The Scottish Euthanasia Society, now known as Exit, warns on its website: "Please note we are flooded with enquiries and very short on staff and resources. Please expect delays of several weeks." Yet the law states aiding or abetting a suicide in Scotland is culpable homicide, although no one has recently been prosecuted, and doctors have been struck off for helping patients to die. We all know medical staff regularly practise mercy-killing and it is over 30 years since Dr George Mair published Confessions Of A Surgeon openly admitting he had performed active euthanasia.

Margo's programme featured the Bowman family of Cumbernauld, whose father had helped their mother, a Parkinson's sufferer, to die as "an act of love" using drugs and a "suicide hood". The father died a year later but if the truth had been known, he could have faced trial for culpable homicide or murder. As Margo said: "Criminalising him for an act of mercy doesn't seem just."

Setting aside religious superstition and mealy-mouthed medical convention, it seems plain common sense to look at least to the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland which allows the terminally ill to kill themselves if they have the mental faculty and physical ability to swallow a fatal dose of drugs.

A small but significant step from that is Holland's legalised euthanasia, with the precaution that a suffering patient must be under the supervision of the doctor for at least 18 months to ensure no one is allowed to end their life for no good medical reason. Fears that the old and helpless might be pressured into accepting euthanasia have been disproved by the fact that there has been no increase in such deaths over the last eight years and the average participating GP only assists a patient to die once every 18 months.

It is a giant step to Oregon, which allows "physician-assisted suicide" with lethal drugs prescribed and kept until needed; and a step too far to Mexico where suicide tourists can buy the drug used to put down animals and try to smuggle it back home.

In this country, we are strangely incapable of coming to terms with the facts of death. Cardinal Keith O'Brien was clearly appalled to hear his friend Margo contemplate assisted suicide: "How can Margo think like that? I love and respect her so much. Life is a gift from Almighty God. If he can give it, he can take that gift from us. But we can't say: 'God, I am finished with it. I can't cope with cancer or Parkinson's'."

We hear a great deal from the "right to life" lobby but not enough about the right to choose a civilised death. I refuse to have anyone, not even a cardinal, telling me how to live my own life or die my own death. As Billy Joel concluded: "Go ahead with your own life and leave me alone."